The white fog didn’t smell like chemical smoke or fire exhaust. It smelled of chalk, damp cellar limestone, and the sickly-sweet, bitter-salt odor of decomposing bone meal.
It rolled over the lip of the collapsed wall like a cold, heavy liquid, pouring down the rubble ramp and filling the trenches with a choking, milky thickness that obscured the wooden walkway planks within seconds. Where the mist touched the muddy puddles, the water instantly turned milky-white, a brittle crust of calcium crystals forming across the surface with faint, crackling sounds like freezing ice. The cold draft it brought was unnatural, raising the hair on Arthur’s arms even through the thick carbon-weave of his trench coat.
“Masks on! Wet rags over your faces! Don’t breathe through your mouths!” Corporal Miller’s voice echoed through the backup ditch, muffled and wild.
A commoner rifleman, stationed behind an iron ore-wagon thirty yards ahead of Bay 9, peered over the stone retaining wall. He had tied a coarse wool handkerchief across his mouth and nose. But as a swirling eddy of the white mist drifted over his low roof wall, he inhaled.
The effect was instant and horrific.
The young soldier dropped his bolt-action rifle, his hands flying to his throat. He didn’t scream. He couldn’t scream. His throat cords, soaked by the atomized calcium-phosphate specks, underwent immediate, violent stone crystal-forming. A ragged, whistling gasp—a high-pitched, desperate stridor that sounded like air being forced through a cracked whistle—tore from his mouth.
